Chris' blog

++++++++Project beginning 01-06-2011++++++++

Wikicake.info

An introduction.

I’ve been given a brand new project to work on,  it’s going to be a tutorial site for cake decorating and sugarcraft, Sugarcraft is both a hobby and a business for some people, and just a hobby for others. The “craft” in itself has many different elements to it, all of which require a certain level of skill to complete different tasks.

Read more…

Over the past couple of days I have been designing and putting together a replacement ebay store template for Design-a-cake.

This ebay template is my second one, the first being for Max Merch, that was a real learning curve (a backwards one!)

ebay is pretty much about 12 years out of date when it comes to web design, with designing for ebay and email templates (which I’ve been doing a lot of over the past couple of months) the phrase “design like its 1999″ is key to sucess. which, is pretty weird, as I’ve spent the last 12 years trying to keep up to date with web technology (and I’m not afraid to admit that I have been failing miserably in this task!)

but now it seems I have to work backwards, and design like I would have back then, back when tables were the key to a good solid design.

Here is a JPEG of my design a cake store front, it won’t be live for another few days, as I have a few kinks to work out, and another couple of pages to build which link to it, but here is a render I’ve put together so you can see what it’s like when its in ebay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve tried to stay clear of rounded corners with this design, the main website (which I had no part in its design), looks similar to the ebay store I have designed (in the fact that there are no rounded corners!) but for both max merch and Design-a-cake, I’ve pretty much overloaded the rounded corner thing recently, so I thought it was time to go back to straight lines, and break out the gradient fades for this one.

Other than the DC logo (I really hope none of Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson‘s relatives don’t ever take up cake decorating as a hobby!) I designed everything myself.

While im still a graphic design novice, I don’t like simply cutting and pasting. I do a lot of online tutorials, youtube is a great resource for this, as is google, purely for finding other graphic designers who do tutorials, However I feel a little disheartened when I try to find a tutorial for something, and when I find it the whole thing is basically “download this image, cut and paste it, then get this image, cut and paste it”

Thats not what I want to be. I want to be able to create everything I make by myself, and if that means that my designs are a bit on the basic side for a while, then so be it. At least I will have the satisfaction that everything I do is my own work.

I do draw the line at fonts though. there is simply too much time and effort goes into typography design for me to be able to practically make my own fonts for each project I do, and besides, there are so many awesome fonts out there available for free use that I may as well use them. I might not always feel this way, but at the moment, I simply have to use pre-made fonts for practicality.

The same goes for code too, while I LOVE the fact that dreamweaver can do a lot of the work for you, I often find myself hand coding large portions of the site (for email design and ebay templates that are table heavy, the “create table function is a godsend though. I hold my hands up to that! nested tables can be a headf**k!).
In this template I decided to go for a CSS rollover for the menu on the left hand side, its been a while since I’ve done this, and I had to get some help from the epically talented matt who I work with, so I’m not going to claim 100% victory on this one, I couldn’t get the text to vertically align properly, and he worked out what my problem was and fixed it for me, so thanks matt!

The rest of the code was all me though (promise!) I didn’t cut and paste from anywhere, it was all hand coded. If I want to learn, and get better at my trade I think its the only way forward.

Brick layers don’t look round for pre-built wall sections and slap a few of those together. so why should I? I’m essentially doing the same thing, only digitally.

unfortunatly, the “items for sale” section, and the “feedback” section, which really are the meat of the site are controlled directly via ebay itself, as you can see in the image above the styling is less than perfect. There IS a way to make it so I can self style it, but I am yet to figure this out, I have posted on the ebay help forums, and spoken on the phone to technical support, but so far all I have been told is that it can’t be done, even when I have posted links to custom ebay stores which have already done it.
I’m considering emailing a store or two who have had it done to see if I can get some pointers, but fully expect to be told to p!$$ off, as effectivly I’ll be asking for free advice that they have paid for to get.

I’ll post again when the store has gone live, and once it is live, I’ll be working on individual item page templates, to tie everything together.
I’ve found that many even seemingly professional ebay stores don’t bother to style their ebay store pages, which totally boggles the mind why they don’t? but I’m hoping to use this to my advantage, by presenting DAC’s pages in a professional manor, hopefully will give people the reassuring confidence to shop with us.

Thanks for reading

Chris

It’s been one week (pretty much down to the minute!) since I sent out my first mass mailout for Design-a-cake,

If you read my first post on this you’ll know that I sent out 3663 emails, all to individuals who have special attributes which led them to be selected for our mailout (mainly shoppers who are currently active with the business, or are VIP members)

The results we have got back have been absolutely astounding! to be honest I didn’t really know what to expect from the campaign, but I was blown away by the positive responses.

Before I talk about it though, here is a copy of the email as an image for you to look at (i.e. the links will not work), also, a point to note, the people who signed up for the mailout got a discount code, which I’ve blurred out in this jpeg, as its still active, and is only available to people on the mailing list!

First point to note, I know that this isn’t the most visually pleasing email ever, the future ones will have a lot more time and effort put into them to “tart” them up before they go out, but with the first one, the time went mainly into making the template, once that was done I was pretty much out of time to get the content to a level that I was honestly happy with, so I know, it needs work. But even so, it’s my first one, and I have personally been very happy with the response I have gained from it, and more importantly, my employers are happy with it. And it might sound cheesy, but If my boss is truly happy with my work, then I’m happy.

So. Mailchimp.
Its probably the best thing on the web since the stalkers wet dream that is google analytics. here are a few stats from the campaign so far,
sent emails: 3663
opened: 2139 (59.4%)
unique clicks: 786 (21%)
bounces: 60 (1.6%)
unsubscribes: 18 (0.49%)

The official averages for retail businesses, or hobbies (both of which DAC fall into), say that the open rate should fall between 18-20%, which as a target, we have SMASHED! now, I know, this newsletter was new, so there may have been a certain level of “wow factor” going on, but still, nearly a 60% open rate is fantastic, and with only 18 unsubscribes, I feel like I’ve defiantly done something right.

The click data told us which of the links were actually used in the email, which will help me to figure out what to place where in the next email, and what products were popular and which no one was bothered about.

The data we managed to gather as the customer was leaving the email was totally amazing, but, unfortunately  the info gathering ends once the user actually gets to the site.
The customer might click one link in the email, then spend a whole hour browsing the links on the site, then place an order, or they might click one link, think “meh, not that bothered” and then leave, and I have no way of tracking this (yet…)
so, to help with this, and as a little reward to people who opened the email, we put in a discount voucher.
This gave the user a “real reason” to open it, they get something tangible  out of the experience of reading my email, but it also gives us a good indication of how well the email has performed. (after all, its a retail business, its all about the coin at the end of the day, right?) We can’t tell from the discount code if the customer was planning a purchase anyway, and just took advantage of the opportunity to save some cash, or, they weren’t planning a purchase, and this persuaded them to, and there will have been people who got the email, were inspired to make a purchase, but didn’t use the code (there are always a few, dunno why, but there are!), and, there are people who get the same level of discount, or higher, who may have been persuaded to make an extra purchase because of the email, but don’t show up in the stats, as their discount code overrides the email one.
So, because of this I decided it was “fair” to count all email discount codes from the email as “new” customers, who were only ordering because of the email.

The money that the discount code pulled in (and total number of orders) was far beyond my expectations, I’m not going to divulge the full info, it wouldn’t be right, as it is not my business, so discussing its finances would be improper and disrespectful to my employer, but, I can safely say that it defiantly paid for itself, and was a worth while endeavor.

Its been a really positive experience for me, and its only going to get better from here, as I now have a basic template that I am happy with, so I can use my time to get the look of the email just right.

For the next one I will be hopefully trying to source a tutorial from one of the employees of the company (a fair number of the people who work for us are cake decorating pro’s, so getting them to write a tutorial shouldn’t be a problem), which will give the reader a nice, free article to read which they may otherwise have had to purchase a magazine or book to get the same info.

I have “big” plans for the email campaign, and plan to run it on a tri weekly basis, which gives me enough time to collate some data from the last one, and gain new material for the new one.

In conclusion, I have learned a vast amount about email design from this experience, and not only that I’ve learned a lot about the business I work for. I’m very happy with the results that the campaign has given us, its helped me learn a lot, and given me a great deal to think about for future email campaigns.

Thanks for reading.

Chris